Religious Trust, Anti-Trust, and Reasons for Religious Belief

This chapter begins by distinguishing two kinds of epistemic reasons, one irreducibly first personal, and the other third personal. Here the kinds of reasons that are irreducibly first personal are called “deliberative reasons,” and the kinds of reasons that are third personal are called “theoretical reasons.” The use of the terms “deliberative” and “theoretical” is not essential to the distinction being made, but these terms draw attention to the different functions of the two kinds of reasons in psychology. Epistemic self-trust is an irreducibly first personal epistemic reason, and it is the most basic reason of either kind. Attacks on religious belief are sometimes third personal, but sometimes they are first personal attacks on self-trust or trust in religious communities. Attacks on self-trust require a different kind of response than attacks on third person reasons.

Religious Knowledge and the Virtues of the Mind

This chapter objects to three features of Reformed Epistemology, two of which are connected with its Calvinist inspiration and one of which was a feature of most contemporary epistemology at the time. First, like almost all contemporary American epistemology, Reformed Epistemology focuses on individual beliefs—where by a “belief” is meant a particular state of believing, not the proposition believed—and it searches for the properties of a belief that convert it into knowledge. Second, Reformed Epistemology is largely externalist. Third, an important motivation driving externalist theories is the desire to avoid skepticism; in fact, this is one of its most attractive features. Reformed epistemology is externalist and nonvoluntarist; it is individualistic rather than communally based; and it makes the element of belief that converts it into knowledge a property of the belief rather than of the believer. The approach here is Aristotelian in spirit and differs from the Reformers in all three respects.

Intellectual Virtues

This chapter defends the view that intellectual virtues are deep and enduring acquired intellectual excellences, supported by the underlying idea in Exemplarist Moral Theory that excellences are admirable traits, and admirable traits are those that people admire on reflection and that have features identified in empirical studies. The intellectual virtues require both admirable intellectual motivations and reliable success in reaching the truth, and the defense of this claim is that that is what people admire on reflection. The connection of intellectual virtue with moral virtue also explains admirable states like wisdom that are recently getting attention in philosophy and psychology after a long period of neglect.

The Moral Transcendental Argument against Skepticism

Transcendental arguments against skepticism claim that the skeptical argument depends on the falsehood or the unbelievability of the skeptical hypothesis. This chapter argues that the skeptic needs to presuppose the moral or practical rationality of the subject, requiring the existence of an external world with certain features (strongest arguments), the falsehood of the skeptical hypothesis (strong arguments), or the subject’s belief in such a world (weak arguments). The argument starts with rational agency and investigates the sense of moral obligation, moral motives, and virtues that would exist in “vat morality,” arguing that although the skeptic needs to presuppose the rational and moral agency of the subject, the skeptical hypothesis denies or undermines the subject’s agency. The chapter ends by considering whether the skeptic can retreat to Pyrrhonian skepticism to save the skeptical project, concluding that he cannot.

The Inescapability of Gettier Problems

This chapter argues that any definition of knowledge as true belief + x will be subject to Gettier-style counterexamples as long as the connection between x (justification, reliability, proper function, etc.) and getting the truth is close but not inviolable. The recipe for generating a counterexample uses the idea of double luck. It starts with an instance of bad luck (A belief is false but has component x) which is canceled out by an instance of good luck (Make the belief true after all for reasons that have nothing to do with the believer). As long as the truth is never assured by the conditions which make the state justified, there will be situations in which a false belief is justified. With this common, in fact, almost universal assumption, Gettier cases will never go away.

Phronesis and Religious Belief

This chapter outlines a theory of rationality integral to virtue theory suggested by a remark by Hilary Putnam that reason is both immanent and transcendent. It is immanent in that it is not to be found outside human language games, cultures, and institutions, but it is also a regulative idea that is used to criticize the conduct of all activities and institutions. The chapter proposes three corollaries of the immanence and transcendence of reason and some constraints that should be respected in defining a rational belief. These proposals are intended to help settle disputes about the rationality or epistemic praiseworthiness of culture-specific beliefs, including beliefs distinctive of a particular religion. The discussion in the chapter is at odds with the approach of Plantinga on the defense of the epistemic status of Christian belief.

The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good

To explain why knowledge is better than mere true belief is remarkably difficultI call this Zagzebski calls this “the value problem,” and most forms of reliabilism cannot handle it. This chapter argues that the value problem is more general than a problem for reliabilism, infecting a host of different theories, including some that are internalist. The chapter aims to answer two questions: (1) What makes knowing p better than merely truly believing p? and (2) What makes some instances of knowing good enough to make the investigation of knowledge worthy of so much attention? The answer involves the connection between the good of believing truths of certain kinds and a good life. The kind of value that makes knowledge a fitting object of extensive philosophical inquiry is not independent of moral value and the wider values of a good life.

From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology

This chapter is Zagzebski’s first paper that discusses “the value problem,” or the problem that an account of knowledge must identify what makes knowledge better than mere true belief. One of the problems with reliabilism is that it does not explain what makes the good of knowledge greater than the good of true belief. In Virtues of the Mind she gave this objection only to process reliabilism. In this chapter she develops the objection in more detail, and argues that the problem pushes first in the direction of three offspring of process reliabilism—faculty reliabilism, proper functionalism, and agent reliabilism, and she then argues that an account of knowledge based on virtuous motives grounded in the motive for truth can solve the value problem.

Introduction

This introduction gives an overview of Zagzebski’s work in epistemology during the last twenty-five years, introducing the papers included in the collection. The subject areas of most of contemporary epistemology are included in these chapters: (1) knowledge and understanding, (2) intellectual virtue, (3) epistemic value, (4) virtue in religious epistemology, (5) intellectual autonomy and authority, and (6) skepticism and the Gettier problem. Some chapters are among the earliest works published on a given topic—e.g., understanding, intellectual virtue, the value problem for knowledge, intellectual authority. Others take a novel approach to an old problem—Gettier, virtue in religious epistemology, a new transcendental argument against skepticism.

Intellectual Autonomy

This chapter describes a view of the self according to which autonomy properly applies in the intellectual domain on the same grounds as it applies in the practical domain. It explains why the power of reflective self-consciousness is more basic than any epistemic reasons—anything that indicates to a reasonable person that some proposition is true. The argument is epistemological, not moral. The conclusion is that the meaning of reason in its theoretical sense derives from reflective self-consciousness. The authority of the self over the self is the natural right of the self to reflect, which is to say, the natural right of the self to be a self. The account of autonomy has nothing to do with the rejection of authority.